Sue Bailey Thurman and Howard Thurman travelled to India, Burma and
Ceylon, as part of the first African-American delegation to colonial
India in 1935-1936, at the height of its anti-colonial struggle against
the British Empire. Known as the Pilgrimage of Friendship to the East,
the delegation was chaired by Howard Thurman, a renowned theologian and
civil rights agitator who would become a mentor to Martin Luther King
Jr., introducing the young King to Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence.
The significance of their visit to furthering mutual understanding
between India and African-America cannot be underscored enough as it was
the first Black Christian delegation to tour India. The pilgrimage
would also constitute a crucial dimension of his 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited,
a work of great spiritual striving and erudition, which King carried
with him everywhere. Knowing this history is vital to understanding
King’s oft-quoted remark that while he went as a tourist to other
countries, to India he came as a pilgrim. In this book, Thurman would
argue that

“American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost
beyond redemption. Churches have been established for the
underprivileged, the weak, the poor on the theory they prefer to be
among themselves. Churches have been established for the Chinese, the
Japanese, the Korean, the Mexican, the Filipino, the Italian and the
Negro with the same theory in mind. The result is that in the one place
in which normal, free contacts might be most naturally established – in
which the relations of the individual to his God should take priority
over conditions of class, race, power, status, wealth or the like – this
place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers.”(Jesus and the Disinherited 98)

“Thurman’s philosophy emphasized the oneness of humanity.”

Thurman was King’s senior by thirty years ,
sharing the same birth year with his father: 1899. His proselytization,
teaching, and scholarship at Howard University and Boston University,
had a profound influence on the civil rights struggle and black
leadership in the twentieth century. His philosophy emphasized the
oneness of humanity and his theology emphasized communion with God and
nature as a way of arriving at the truth about human existence. He saw
the segregation of the Christian church in the United States as a great
evil and his search for peace took him to India, where he and Sue Bailey
Thurman lectured widely and built relations with prominent figures like
Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi.

Though Gandhi had embraced the teachings of Christ by the time the Thurman delegation came to India, most Indians were antagonistic towards
Western Christianity given its repression of native spiritual
traditions and saw great hope in African-American interpretations of
Christ’s teachings. As Gandhi put it, he loved Christ, but couldn’t say
the same about white Christians, who invoked the Bible to justify
colonial violence against the darker races: “Your Christians are so
unlike your Christ.” King also drew attention to this central
contradiction in Christianity, noting in a fiery 1956 sermon about “Redirecting Our Missionary Zeal “:

“The paradox of it all is that the white man considers himself
the supreme missionary. He sends [millions] of dollars to the foreign
field. And in the midst of that he tramples over the Negro.”

“As Gandhi put it, he loved Christ, but couldn’t say the same about white Christians.”

Gandhi began developing his own interests in Christianity as early as
South Africa, after having come in contact with an English priest named
Charles Andrews, who decried the white church’s treatment of Africans and Indians and
lent his support to Gandhi who was there to study the condition of
Indian laborers. In 1929, Andrews traveled to the United States and
spoke on the theory of nonviolence at black colleges and universities .
At the time, Gandhi was organizing the Indian people against the
repressive imperialist tax on salt, which culminated in the great Dandi
Satyagraha, where he marched more than 150 miles from Sabarmati with
upwards of 60,000 Indians who vowed to produce their own salt in
defiance of the British tax on the sale of salt. The act commanded the
attention of the world to the struggle of the Indians, and was widely
covered by the international press.

But Gandhi’s ambition was much higher than independence. “Through the
deliverance of India,” he said, “I seek to deliver the so-called weaker
races of the Earth from the crushing heels of Western exploitation in
which England is the greatest partner” (see “Independence vs. Swaraj,”12
January 1928). White Christianity was an integral part of Western
exploitation. Like Thurman, Gandhi believed that the consequences of
racial strife and Western exploitation were manifested most tragically
in the inner life of human beings, in the dilapidation of the soul, in
the breaking of the spirit, in the negation humanity’s fundamental interconnectedness to each other as well as to God and nature .

“Gandhi believed that the consequences of racial strife
and Western exploitation were manifested most tragically in the inner
life of human beings.”

As King put it later, we are all wrapped in a single garment of
destiny and were responsible to the “cosmic partnership.” Western
civilization, by contrast, had done great violence to this unity of
mankind, valorizing in its place man’s inhumanity to man. It was for
this reason that Gandhi would refer to segregation as a “negation of civilization ,” a thought that King would echo in his sermon, “Paul’s Letter to American Christians ,”
which emphasizes the Eastern origins of Western civilization, like
Gandhi. As is somewhat well-known, King came to the teachings of Gandhi
during his studies at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where
in a homework assignment, he recognized Gandhi for having revealed to
him “the working of the spirit of God in bringing about moral
transformation within the individual.” King confesses to becoming a disciple of
Gandhi upon listening to a lecture given by Mordecai Johnson in
Philadelphia, shortly after the Howard University president’s own trip
to India.

“Gandhi called segregation a negation of civilization.”

Mirabehn (née Miriam Slade), an English disciple of Gandhi’s, played
an important role in the concretization of the Thurman delegation’s
invitation to India. Mirabehn, who was christened as such by Gandhi
himself, was a prominent British admiral’s daughter. Thurman, who had
been searching for a way to organize a meeting with Gandhi, intercepted
her during her visit to the U.S. As he writes of her in his
autobiography, With Head and Heart

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